No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Costs and Benefits of Eyewitness Identification Reform Psychological Science and Public Policy
Abstract
Psychological science has come to play an increasingly important role in the legal system by informing the court through expert testimony and by shaping public policy. In recent years, psychological research has driven a movement to reform the procedures that police use to obtain eyewitness identification evidence. This reform movement has been based in part on an argument suggesting that recommended procedures reduce the risk of false identifications with little or no reduction in the rate of correct identifications. A review of the empirical literature, however, challenges this no-cost view. With only one exception, changes in eyewitness identification procedures that reduce the risk of false identification of the innocent also reduce the likelihood of correct identification of the guilty. The implication that criminals may escape prosecution as a result of procedures implemented to protect the innocent makes policy decisions far more complicated than they would otherwise be under the no-cost view. These costs (correct identifications lost) and benefits (false identifications avoided) are discussed in terms of probative value and expected utility.
© The Author(s) 2012.
... For that reason, empirical evidence on the benefits of blind administration ought to be convincing and clear, but this is not so. Although some research indicates that properly blinded administration of lineups results in identifications that are more diagnostic of guilt than less well blinded administration (Greathouse & Kovera, 2009), other research has produced different results (see Russano, Dickinson, Greathouse, & Kovera, 2006, for a review), and a recent synthesis of the evidence suggests that gains achieved by blind administration regarding reducing false identifications of innocent suspects is directly offset by a reduction in identifications of perpetrators (Clark, 2012). ...
... The sequential lineup is said to elicit nearly as many correct identifications of guilty perpetrators as the traditional simultaneous lineup but only 40% as many incorrect identifica tions of innocent suspects (e.g., Steblay, Dysart, Fulero, & Lindsay, 2001;Steblay, Dysart, & Wells, 2011). However, a growing list of original and synthesis studies have suggested that the tradeoff between correct identifications and false alarms is equivalent across the two kinds of lineup (e.g., Clark, 2012;Gronlund, Carlson, Dailey, & Goodsell, 2009;McQuistonSurret, Malpass, & Tredoux, 2006;Meissner et al., 2005) and that sequential lineups simply make witnesses more conserva tive (i.e., less likely to choose anybody). In other words, sequential lineups lose correct identifications of guilty perpetrators in direct proportion to the incorrect identifications of innocent suspects they avoid. ...
... In particular, the interaction between informational and decisional processes is best understood through signal detection theory. The implications of using SDT are multifold, and researchers in the field are making important discoveries, starkly illuminated recently by Clark's (2012) evidence that alterations to the way police collect eyewitness evidence and identifications involve a tradeoff between fewer identifications of innocent suspects and fewer identifications of guilty suspects. There is little doubt in our minds that the conceptual framework afforded by SDT offers an opportunity to make eyewitness research considerably more rigorous and to augment its considerable extant achievements. ...
... The wrongful conviction of Antonio Beaver highlights the importance of avoiding composition-biased lineups where the suspect stands out as the only plausible choice. Dozens of experiments demonstrate that, compared to unbiased lineups where the suspect does not stand out, biased lineups increase mistaken identifications of innocent suspects and undermine suspect-identification accuracy (Clark, 2012;Fitzgerald et al., 2013;Lindsay & Wells, 1980). But why would laypersons find someone guilty when the only evidence leveraged against that person was an identification from a composition-biased lineup? ...
... The result is that Beaver likely stood out as a stronger match to the witness' memory than the remaining lineup members and as the obvious choice, even though he was innocent. Biased fillers do not protect innocent suspects from mistaken identification, and suspect identifications from biased lineups are less reliable than those from unbiased lineups (Clark, 2012;Lindsay & Wells, 1980). ...
... Although suspect identifications from biased lineups are less reliable than are suspect identifications from unbiased lineups (Clark, 2012;Lindsay & Wells, 1980), laypersons judge identifications from biased lineups as more reliable than identifications from unbiased lineups (Ying et al., 2023). This is partly attributable to the fact that laypersons misunderstand or are oblivious to several core aspects of how lineups work. ...
General Audience Summary
Witnesses are more likely to identify an innocent suspect from a lineup in which that person stands out (biased lineup) compared to when that person does not stand out (unbiased lineup). However, when presented with the witness’s description of the culprit, the lineup that was presented to the witness, and told who the witness identified, laypersons rate identifications from biased lineups as more reliable than identifications from unbiased lineups. This is known as the biased-lineup preference effect. We tested two mechanisms for the biased-lineup preference effect: perceptual fluency and overestimation of culprit presence. According to the perceptual-fluency hypothesis, laypersons use their own experience in forming a preference for the suspect as a proxy for witness accuracy. Laypersons rate witness accuracy as high to the extent that they themselves find it easy to form a preference for the suspect. Because it is easier for laypersons to form a preference for the suspect on a biased lineup than on an unbiased lineup, they infer that biased lineups facilitate witness accuracy. Alternatively, the overestimation of culprit presence account attributes the biased-lineup preference effect to laypersons assuming that the culprit is present in the lineup and that the task of the witness is to pick that person out. Across three experiments, we demonstrate that the biased-lineup preference effect is driven by perceptual fluency and not by overestimation of culprit presence. The magnitude of the biased-lineup preference effect was invariant to changes in perceptions of culprit-presence base rates (Experiments 1 and 2) but highly correlated with perceived ease (Experiment 1). Furthermore, we manipulated perceptual fluency via prior exposure to the suspect and that also led to higher ratings of witness accuracy (Experiment 3). Laypersons’ perceptions of witness accuracy are biased by how easy they find it to pick the suspect out of the lineup themselves.
... For that reason, empirical evidence on the benefits of blind administration ought to be convincing and clear, but this is not so. Although some research indicates that properly blinded administration of lineups results in identifications that are more diagnostic of guilt than less well blinded administration (Greathouse & Kovera, 2009), other research has produced different results (see Russano, Dicldnson, Greathouse, & Kovera, 2006, for a review), and a recent synthesis of the evidence suggests that gains achieved by blind administration regarding reducing false identifications of innocent suspects is directly offset by a reduction in identifications of perpetrators (Clark, 2012). ...
... The sequential lineup is said to elicit nearly as many correct identifications of guilty perpetrators as the traditional simultaneous lineup but only 40% as many incorrect identifica tions of innocent suspects (e.g., Steblay, Dysart, Fulero, & Lindsay, 2001;Steblay, Dysart, & Wells, 2011). However, a growing list of original and synthesis studies have suggested that the trade-off between correct identifications and false alarms is equivalent across the two kinds of lineup (e.g., Clark, 2012;Gronlund, Carlson, Dailey, & Goodsell, 2009;McQuiston-Surret, Malpass, & Tredoux, 2006;Meissner et al., 2005) and that sequential lineups simply make witnesses more conserva tive (i.e., less likely to choose anybody). In other words, sequential lineups lose correct identifications of guilty perpetrators in direct proportion to the incorrect identifications of innocent suspects they avoid. ...
... In particular, the interaction between informational and decisional processes is best understood through signal detection theory. The implications of using SDT are multifold, and researchers in the field are making important discoveries, starkly illuminated recently by Clark's (2012) evidence that alterations to the way police collect eyewitness evidence and identifications involve a trade-off between fewer identifications of innocent suspects and fewer identifications of guilty suspects. There is little doubt in our minds that the conceptual framework afforded by SDT offers an opportunity to make eyewitness research considerably more rigorous and to augment its considerable extant achievements. ...
... However, it has been argued that the diagnosticity ratio is an inadequate measure of lineup performance because it confounds the ability to distinguish between a culprit and an innocent suspect with response bias [e.g., 72 ]. Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analyses do not have this problem and have shown either that simultaneous lineups perform better than sequential lineups 23,49,59,73,74 or that sequential and simultaneous lineups perform equally well 55,[75][76][77] . ROC analyses are said to have the advantage of delivering a performance measure that is not confounded by response bias 23 . ...
... A small superiority of simultaneous over sequential lineups was also found by Winter et al. 32 when applying the 2-HT eyewitness identification model to both simultaneous and sequential lineups. This pattern in the results based on the 2-HT eyewitness identification model is in good agreement with the results of ROC-based analyses in which a superiority of simultaneous over sequential lineups was sometimes found [e.g., 23,49,59,73,74 ] but not always [e.g., 55,[75][76][77] ]. ...
... Note that this general pattern is already evident from surface-level data: The rate of identifications was consistently higher in the sequential lineup conditions than in the simultaneous lineup conditions (0.81 vs. 0. 67 www.nature.com/scientificreports/ associated with more conservative responding than simultaneous lineups [e.g., 75 ]. However, in contrast to many previous studies, we did not inform our participants in the sequential lineup conditions that only their first "yes" response counts. ...
The mock-witness task is typically used to evaluate the fairness of lineups. However, the validity of this task has been questioned because there are substantial differences between the tasks for mock witnesses and eyewitnesses. Unlike eyewitnesses, mock witnesses must select a person from the lineup and are alerted to the fact that one lineup member might stand out from the others. It therefore seems desirable to base conclusions about lineup fairness directly on eyewitness data rather than on mock-witness data. To test the importance of direct measurements of biased suspect selection in eyewitness identification decisions, we assessed the fairness of lineups containing either morphed or non-morphed fillers using both mock witnesses and eyewitnesses. We used Tredoux’s E and the proportion of suspect selections to measure lineup fairness from mock-witness choices and the two-high threshold eyewitness identification model to measure the biased selection of the suspects directly from eyewitness identification decisions. Results obtained in the mock-witness task and the model-based analysis of data obtained in the eyewitness task converged in showing that simultaneous lineups with morphed fillers were significantly more unfair than simultaneous lineups with non-morphed fillers. However, mock-witness and eyewitness data converged only when the eyewitness task mimicked the mock-witness task by including pre-lineup instructions that (1) discouraged eyewitnesses to reject the lineups and (2) alerted eyewitnesses that a photograph might stand out from the other photographs in the lineup. When a typical eyewitness task was created by removing these two features from the pre-lineup instructions, the morphed fillers no longer lead to unfair lineups. These findings highlight the differences in the cognitive processes of mock witnesses and eyewitnesses and they demonstrate the importance of measuring lineup fairness directly from eyewitness identification decisions rather than indirectly using the mock-witness task.
... The ultimate goal of an identification attempt is to use the witness response to judge whether or not the suspect is guilty (Clark, 2012;Wells & Lindsay, 1980;Wells, Yang, & Smalarz, 2015). Eyewitness research demonstrates that the success of this enterprise varies widely across situations; for example, positive identifications isolate guilty suspects with extreme reliability in some circumstances (Seale-Carlisle et al., 2019), but are very likely to promote false convictions of innocent suspects in other circumstances (Gronlund et al., 2009). ...
... Given the huge range of effectiveness across different identification procedures, researchers need to be able to assess a given procedure's potential to inform judgments about guilt or innocence. Researchers have compared the effectiveness of identification procedures using a range of quantitative measures such as the change in the probability of guilt from before to after an identification (Wells & Lindsay, 1980), diagnosticity ratios (Clark, 2012), area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC; Mickes et al., 2012), deviation from perfect performance , and expected utility (Ceci & Friedman, 2000). The relative merits of these measures are a matter of continuing debate (Lampinen, 2016;Lampinen et al., 2019;Rotello & Chen, 2016;Smith et al., 2018;Wixted et al., 2017;. ...
... Although the Bayesian approach has supported important discoveries, it has a critical limitation: It is used to assess the evidentiary value of a single witness response at a time, for example, a suspect ID. The focus on single responses offers no way to resolve commonly observed tradeoffs that highlight offsetting strengths and weaknesses of different lineup procedures, for example, whereas a suspect ID may support higher certainty of guilt for Procedure A, a rejection may support higher certainty of innocence for Procedure B (Wells, Yang, et al., 2015; also see Clark, 2012). Moreover, considering responses in isolation is not an effective way to compare procedures that have noncorresponding response options, such as different methods for obtaining confidence ratings or different ways to use variables that predict witness accuracy (Brewer et al., 2020). ...
We present a method for measuring the efficacy of eyewitness identification procedures by applying fundamental principles of information theory. The resulting measure evaluates the expected information gain (EIG) for an identification attempt, a single value that summarizes an identification procedure’s overall potential for reducing uncertainty about guilt or innocence across all possible witness responses. In a series of demonstrations, we show that EIG often disagrees with existing measures (e.g., diagnosticity ratios or area under the receiver operating characteristic) about the relative effectiveness of different identification procedures. Each demonstration is designed to highlight key distinctions between existing measures and EIG. An overarching theme is that EIG provides a complete measure of evidentiary value, in the sense that it factors in all aspects of identification performance. Collectively, these demonstrations show that EIG has substantial potential to inspire new discoveries in eyewitness research and provide a new perspective on policy recommendations for the use of identifications in real investigations.
... Despite decades of research, successful attempts to develop innovative procedures to improve eyewitness accuracy based on psychological theory are scant. Proposed lineup procedures often render participants less likely to choose the suspect, and have little effect on people's ability to discriminate between innocent and guilty suspects (e.g., Clark, 2012;Meissner, Tredoux, et al., 2005;Palmer & Brewer, 2012). Put another way, proposed procedures often elicit a more conservative response bias, but have not been shown to enhance discrimination accuracy. ...
... A procedure that elicits a more conservative response bias protects the innocent (by reducing the false identification rate), but this comes at the cost of protecting the guilty (by also reducing the correct identification rate). Implementing lineup procedures that enhance discrimination accuracy should be the goal of policymakers, because procedures that enhance discrimination accuracy can minimize the likelihood of incorrect innocent suspect identifications, while also maximizing the likelihood of correct guilty suspect identifications (Clark, 2012;Gronlund et al., 2015;National Research Council, 2014). To date, no lineup procedure has been shown to improve adult witness discrimination accuracy more than a standard simultaneous frontal pose photo lineup (e.g., . ...
... on eyewitness discriminability, but it will up to policymakers consider costs and normative and legal factors beyond the empirical data to determine which lineup procedure to use (Clark, 2012). While policymakers should be interested in which procedures improve eyewitness discrimination accuracy so that eyewitnesses are best able to distinguish innocent from guilty suspects, legal decision-makers (e.g., judges, jurors, and police officers) are interested in the reliability of identification evidence (Mickes, 2015). ...
Eyewitness identifications play a key role in the justice system, but eyewitnesses can make errors, often with profound consequences. We used findings from basic science and innovative technologies to develop and test whether a novel interactive lineup procedure, wherein witnesses can rotate and dynamically view the lineup faces from different angles, improves witness discrimination accuracy compared with a widely used procedure in laboratories and police forces around the world—the static frontal-pose photo lineup. No novel procedure has previously been shown to improve witness discrimination accuracy. In Experiment 1, participants (N = 220) identified culprits from sequentially presented interactive lineups or static frontal-pose photo lineups. In Experiment 2, participants (N = 8,507) identified culprits from interactive lineups that were either presented sequentially, simultaneously wherein the faces could be moved independently, or simultaneously wherein the faces moved jointly into the same angle. Sequential interactive lineups enhanced witness discrimination accuracy compared with static photo lineups, and simultaneous interactive lineups enhanced witness discrimination accuracy compared with sequential interactive lineups. These finding were true both when participants viewed suspects who were of the same or different ethnicity/race as themselves. Our findings exemplify how basic science can be used to address the important applied policy issue on how best to conduct a police lineup and reduce eyewitness errors.
... Using Clark's (2003) WITNESS model, Wetmore et al. (2017) explored the potential interactions between lineup size, lineup fairness, and lineup presentation. In fair lineups, adding fillers tended to reduce identifications of both guilty and innocent suspects, producing the same type of trade-off found in previous reviews of other lineup procedures (Clark, 2012;Palmer & Brewer, 2012). It is considered a trade-off because the benefit of increasing protection for innocent suspects in larger lineups would also come with a cost of fewer guilty suspect identifications. ...
... Criminal investigators use identification procedures to discriminate between suspects who are guilty and suspects who are innocent. Showups are regarded as an identification procedure with poorer suspect guilt discriminability than lineups because showups increase the risk of an innocent suspect misidentification and also decrease the chance of a guilty suspect identification (Clark, 2012;Neuschatz et al., 2016). However, a procedure's effect on discrimination is not always so clear-cut. ...
... If a change in lineup size would result in a trade-off, a clear policy recommendation is unlikely to emerge from a simple analysis of identification outcomes. Even if certain lineup sizes were found to improve suspect guilt discriminability, this would have to be interpreted in the context of the prior probability of guilt and the costs associated with each identification outcome (Clark, 2012;Wells et al., 2015). After observing no effect of lineup size on suspect guilt discriminability, Wooten et al. (2020) suggested that three-member lineups may perform similarly with 12-member lineups; however, this interpretation assumes a 50% likelihood that the suspect is guilty and that misidentifying an innocent suspect identification would be no more costly than failing to identify a guilty suspect. ...
The inclusion of known-innocent fillers in a lineup is fairer than presenting only the suspect to an eyewitness and offers protection from mistaken identification if the suspect is innocent. This meta-analysis addresses the question of how many fillers should be included in a lineup. Data from 17,088 participants across 14 experiments revealed a trade-off associated with increasing the number of lineup members. Innocent suspects receive better protection from larger lineups than from smaller lineups, but larger lineups also make it harder for eyewitnesses to identify guilty suspects. Expected cost analyses showed that the least costly lineup size depends on the base rate of suspect guilt and the cost of incriminating an innocent suspect. If incriminating an innocent suspect is considered 10 times as costly as failing to incriminate the true perpetrator (Blackstone ratio), then larger lineups would be less costly for the majority of possible base rates. Smaller lineups would only be less costly if the base rate of suspect guilt is high, or if incriminating an innocent suspect is considered to have minimal costs. There remains much to learn about lineup size and its potential interactions with filler plausibility and the method of lineup presentation. Nevertheless, these preliminary results suggest that many jurisdictions would benefit from increasing the minimum number of fillers in their lineups.
... In our experiments, we constructed lineups with fillers whose hair was similar or dissimilar to the appearance of the designated innocent suspect. This type of filler bias is known to increase mistaken IDs of innocent suspects (Clark, 2012;Fitzgerald et al., 2013;R. C. L. Lindsay & Wells, 1980;Smith et al., 2017). ...
... The suspect ID error rate is the inverse of PPV, and our experiments show that the nominal size correction gives a distorted impression of PPV if lineups are not perfectly fair. If a witness has previously reported that the culprit has curly hair and the only lineup member with curly hair is the suspect, this bias would be expected to increase suspect IDs regardless of whether the suspect is guilty or innocent (Clark, 2012;R. C. L. Lindsay & Wells, 1980;Wells et al., 1993). ...
Objective: The risk of mistaken identification for innocent suspects in lineups can be estimated by correcting the overall error rate by the number of people in the lineup. We compared this nominal size correction to a new effective size correction, which adjusts the error rate for the number of plausible lineup members. Hypotheses: We hypothesized that (a) increasing lineup bias would increase misidentifications of a designated innocent suspect; (b) with the effective size correction, increasing lineup bias would also increase the estimate of innocent-suspect misidentifications; and (c) with the nominal size correction, lineup bias would have no effect on the estimate of innocent-suspect misidentifications. Method: In a reanalysis of previous literature, we obtained 10 data sets from Open Science Framework. In three new experiments (Ns = 686, 405, and 1,531, respectively), participants observed a staged crime and completed a fair or biased lineup. Results: In the reanalysis of previous literature, less than four of six lineup members were identified frequently enough to be classified as plausible, M = 3.78, 95% confidence interval [CI: 2.20, 5.36]. In the new experiments, increasing lineup bias increased mistaken identifications of a designated innocent suspect, odds ratio (OR) = 5.50, 95% CI [2.77, 10.95] and also increased the effective size-corrected estimate of innocent-suspect misidentifications, OR = 3.04, 95% CI [2.13, 4.33]. With the nominal size correction, lineup bias had no effect on the estimate of innocent-suspect misidentifications, OR = 0.84, 95% CI [0.60, 1.18]. Conclusions: Most lineups include a combination of plausible and implausible lineup members. Contrary to the nominal size correction, which ignores implausible lineup members, the effective size correction is sensitive to implausible lineup members and accounts for lineup bias when estimating the risk of innocent suspect misidentifications.
... Although psychological scientists have made tremendous contributions to increasing the rule in potential of lineups, the field has been apathetic towards the importance of ruling out innocent suspects. When making inferences about which of two identification procedures is superior, universal practice has long been to infer that whichever procedure produces a better trade-off between guilty-suspect identifications and innocent-suspect identifications (has better rule in potential) is superior (e.g., Clark, 2012;Mickes et al., 2012;Steblay et al., 2003;Smith et al., 2018). Historically, researchers have not had a statistical tool that simultaneously considered both the rule in and rule out potential of lineups. ...
... Replicating the broader literature, d' computed on suspect identifications is higher for lineups than for showups (Clark, 2012;Steblay et al., 2003). ...
... A superiority of sequential lineups has been postulated based on the diagnosticity ratio 44 which, however, has been criticized for confounding the ability to distinguish between a culprit and an innocent suspect and response bias 20 . SDT-based analyses have sometimes shown equivalent performance of simultaneous and sequential lineups 13,37,39,47,83,84 and sometimes a superiority of simultaneous over sequential lineups 11,38,62,[85][86][87][88] . In all experiments reported here, the estimates of the culprit-presence detection parameter dP were slightly but consistently higher in the simultaneous-lineup conditions than in the sequential-lineup conditions. ...
... At first glance, this may seem unexpected because it has often been found that sequential lineups lead to more conservative responding than simultaneous lineups (e.g. 83 ). In the present experiments, the higher tendency towards guessing that the culprit is in the lineup is already apparent at the level of the raw response probabilities: the mean rate of lineup identifications was consistently higher in the sequential lineups than in the simultaneous lineups (0.77 to 0.55 in Experiment 1, 0.65 to 0.54 in Experiment 2, 0.77 to 0.54 in Experiment 3 and 0.72 to 0.57 in Experiment 4). ...
To improve police protocols for lineup procedures, it is helpful to understand the processes underlying eyewitness identification performance. The two-high threshold (2-HT) eyewitness identification model is a multinomial processing tree model that measures four latent cognitive processes on which eyewitness identification decisions are based: two detection-based processes (the detection of culprit presence and absence) and two non-detection-based processes (biased and guessing-based selection). The model takes into account the full 2 × 3 data structure of lineup procedures, that is, suspect identifications, filler identifications and rejections in both culprit-present and culprit-absent lineups. Here the model is introduced and the results of four large validation experiments are reported, one for each of the processes specified by the model. The validation experiments served to test whether the model’s parameters sensitively reflect manipulations of the processes they were designed to measure. The results show that manipulations of exposure duration of the culprit’s face at encoding, lineup fairness, pre-lineup instructions and ease of rejection of culprit-absent lineups were sensitively reflected in the parameters representing culprit-presence detection, biased suspect selection, guessing-based selection and culprit-absence detection, respectively. The results of the experiments thus validate the interpretations of the parameters of the 2-HT eyewitness identification model.
... In practice, it is not always easy to determine which diagnostic system leads to better discriminability. It is often the case that one system leads to both a higher true-positive rate and a higher false-positive rate than does a comparison system (e.g., Clark, 2012). ROC curves were specifically designed to deal with these trade-offs. ...
... ROC curves have become a popular method for eyewitness researchers to handle the trade-offs that are commonly involved in lineup comparisons (Clark, 2012;. Whereas some researchers have separately considered the incriminating properties of suspect identifications and the exculpating properties of rejections and filler picks (e.g., Wells & Lindsay, 1980;Wells & Olson, 2002;Wells & Turtle, 1986), the field has focused mainly on suspect identifications and the capacity of a lineup to incriminate. ...
A police lineup is a procedure in which a suspect is surrounded by known-innocent persons (fillers) and presented to the witness for an identification attempt. The purpose of a lineup is to test the investigator’s hypothesis that the suspect is the culprit, and the investigator uses the witness’ identification decision and the associated confidence level to inform this hypothesis. Whereas suspect identifications provide evidence of guilt, filler identifications and rejections provide evidence of innocence. Despite the capacity of lineups to provide exculpatory information, past research has focused, almost exclusively, on inculpatory behaviors. We recently developed a method for incorporating all lineup outcomes in a single Receiver Operator Characteristic (ROC) curve. The area under the full lineup ROC curve reflects the total capacity of a lineup procedure to discriminate guilty suspects from innocent suspects. Here, we introduce a Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) package, fullROC, to support eyewitness researchers in using the full ROC approach to analyzing lineup data. The fullROC package provides functions for adjusting identification rates, generating full ROC curves for lineup data, computing the area under the ROC curves (AUC), and statistically comparing the AUCs of different lineups. Using both simulated and empirical data, we illustrate the functionality of the fullROC CRAN package. In brief, the fullROC package provides a useful tool for eyewitness researchers to analyze lineup data using the full ROC method, which incorporates both the inculpatory and exculpatory information of eyewitness behaviors.
... The logic of using a lineup instead of a showup is that if the suspect is innocent, the known-innocent fillers offer this individual some protection from mistaken identification in that witnesses will often identify a filler rather than the innocent suspect. When it comes to identifying persons, it is well documented that relative to showups, lineups result in far fewer innocent-suspect identifications and have less impact on the culprit identification rate (e.g., Clark, 2012;Steblay, Dysart, Fulero, & Lindsay, 2003). The wrongful conviction of George Souliotes is a case in point: when it came to presenting Souliotes to the witness, the lineup did its job in protecting Souliotes from mistaken identification. ...
... We did not compare DPP under the assumption that missed culprit identifications are costlier than innocent-suspect identifications because such an assumption is absurd. Indeed, whenever a witness mistakenly identifies an innocent suspect, an innocent person is erroneously implicated and the culprit goes free (see Ceci & Friedman, 2000;Clark, 2012). Given this inequality, we feel it would be irrational to weight missed culprit identifications as costlier than innocent-suspect identifications. ...
General Audience Summary
When it comes to presenting a suspect to a witness for an identification attempt, it is better to first surround that suspect with high-similarity known-innocent persons (to use a “fair” lineup) than it is to present the suspect to the witness in isolation (to use a showup). The rationale is that if the suspect is innocent, these known-innocent persons (called fillers) offer the suspect protection from mistaken identification as many witnesses will mistakenly identify a known-innocent filler rather than the innocent suspect. But, because police officers know these fillers are innocent, a mistaken identification of one of these persons will not result in an arrest and potential conviction as it might for the innocent suspect. Critically, relative to showups, the known-innocent fillers in lineups draw more picks away from innocent-suspects than they do from guilty suspects. The result is that lineups lead to a better trade-off between culprit and innocent-suspect identifications than do showups (e.g., Smith, Wells, Lindsay, & Penrod, 2017). We examined whether this lineup advantage extends from facial identification procedures to what we call forensic-object identification procedures. Participants (N = 1906) watched a video of a car theft and then attempted to identify both the culprit and the vehicle from separate showup or lineup procedures. For half of the participants, both the culprit and the target vehicle were present in their respective identification procedures and for the remaining participants neither the culprit nor the vehicle was present in their respective identification procedures. For both the facial and forensic-object identification procedures, we found evidence that lineups were superior to showups. In addition, confidence was helpful at discriminating between accurate and inaccurate suspect identifications for forensic-object lineups, but not for forensic-object showups.
... The benefit-cost view of Clark (2012) explains that some procedures (e.g., sequential lineups) effectively reduce misidentifications of an innocent suspect, but also reduce correct identifications of a guilty suspect in lineups. The decrease in guilty suspect identifications by sequential procedures may be largely driven by a decrease in illegitimate hits (i.e., guilty suspect identifications from guessing eyewitnesses whose memory for the perpetrator is weak; Penrod, 2003;Wells et al., 2013), but the consequences of simultaneous procedures can also be explained in terms of the criterion shift of eyewitnesses. ...
The present study explored cultural differences in eyewitness identification across South Korea and the UK using a 2 (Country: South Korea vs. the UK) × 2 (target race: Asian & White) × 2 (target presence: present & absent) × 2 (lineup mode: simultaneous & sequential) mixed design. The results showed no significant differences in decision criteria or identification accuracy between the two countries. The moderating effects of lineup mode or target race on accuracy were similar across both countries, but not on criteria. The lineup mode affected eyewitness accuracy in both countries, with simultaneous lineups leading to higher accuracy. However, decision criteria were influenced by lineup mode and target race in the UK, but not in South Korea. This implies that decision criteria may be more culturally sensitive than identification accuracy and raises concerns about generalizing findings from the eyewitness literature predominantly based on western samples to East Asian contexts.
... Thirdly, develop and use standard witness instructions. Simple instructions should be given to the eyewitness in the identification process, such as telling the witness that the perpetrator may or may not be in the photo array or lineup and that the investigation will continue even if they have challenges identifying a suspect (Clark, 2012). Fourthly, police personnel should be trained in eyewitness identification. ...
Since 1989, mistaken eyewitness identification (MEI) has been estimated to contribute to around 75% of the more than 185 wrongful convictions in the United States alone. According to the psychological expert, eyewitness testimony is a legal term that refers to the recollection by people of an event they have witnessed for a crime. Considering these profound insinuations of eyewitness testimony, this psychological report aims to critically examine the cost and benefits of experimental and qualitative research on EWT and finally give recommendations that can assist jurors and judges in evaluating EWT in court proceedings. Despite this confidence, which has been supported through numerous research studies by qualitative and quantitative measures over the last four decades, this confidence has been challenged and debunked as not being a substantial, reliable factor in predicting EWT accuracy. One such famous experimental study was the car crash, which argued that the confidence of accuracy based on memory can be malleable. Furthermore, qualitative research on EWT is cost-effective and can be done quickly, helping the judicial system decipher EWT more promptly to solve cases. On the other hand, experimental research assists the court system in understanding the causes and effects based on the variables that affect the memory accuracy of EWT. Although qualitative and quantitative research have provided robust literature on EWT, there are a few limitations. Quantitative research can be time-consuming and costly, and sometimes fails to describe human factors involved with EWT. Qualitative research primarily fails to highlight EWT's cause and lacks statistical significance. Despite the significant milestone, far more investigative, empirical research will be needed to fill the psychological gaps in the literature and assist the legal system in improving the confidence and accuracy of eyewitness testimonials of witnesses.
... Because these were computed at the group level, this resulted in a single d' and a single c score for each condition. Although this approach is atypical in the face matching literature, which typically involves within-subject manipulations of match versus mismatch trials, it is used in the eyewitness identification literature (Fitzgerald & Price, 2015;Clark, 2012;Mickes et al., 2014). This is often necessary in eyewitness identification studies because the presence of the target at the identification test is a between-subject manipulation. ...
Border control officers must decide whether passport images match their holders. In previous research on passport verification most participants have been more willing to report nonmatching passports than is likely to occur in practice. We designed an experimental paradigm to increase participants' motivation to avoid these types of errors in passport verification. Participants decided whether passport photographs matched ambient photographs of passport holders. Most passports matched their holders and nonmatching passports were rare. All participants received feedback on their passport verification decisions, and an experimental group also received a time‐consuming consequence if they made an error. Relative to the control condition that only received feedback, consequences were effective in reducing mistaken accusations of nonmatching passports. Consequences also increased the miss rate for nonmatching passports, but the increase in misses over the control condition was not significant. We conclude that consequences can make participants behave more like real border control officers.
... Estimating the values of these components is not easy and can be subjective (S. E. Clark, 2012;Lampinen et al., 2019). Indeed, philosophers and researchers have confronted the challenge of addressing these utilities over the ages (Volokh, 1997). ...
Objective: Racial biases exist in almost every aspect of the criminal legal system, resulting in disparities across all stages of legal procedures—before, during, and after a legal procedure. Building on expected utility theory, we propose an expected utility framework to organize and quantify racial disparities in legal procedures. Hypotheses: Corresponding to the parameteres involved in estimating expected utility, we hypothesized that racial biases would occur at different stages of legal procedures. Method: Using police interrogation procedures as an example, we obtained estimates from previous literature and demonstrated that racial disparities exist at each stage of legal procedures. We then used these estimates to compute and visualize expected utilities, which quantify the average long-term outcomes of interrogations for minority versus nonminority suspects. Results: Based on this hypothetical example, the expected utility analysis suggests that biases at various stages of interrogations could potentially lead to substantial disparities in legal outcomes between racial groups. In particular, the example shows that interrogations might yield notably worse outcomes for minority suspects than nonminority suspects because of cumulative biases that occur before, during, and after this legal procedure. Conclusions: The proposed expected utility approach not only offers a valuable tool for accounting the joint impacts of multiple stages of legal procedures to quantify racial disparities but also carries important implications for how the criminal legal system could reduce such disparities. That is, the criminal legal system must seek to reduce racial biases across all stages of legal procedures rather than focusing on just one aspect.
... A witness also needs to be able to identify the perpetrator if present in the lineup. More recently, experimental psychologists noticed that many of the recommended lineup procedures reduced the misidentification rate and protected innocent suspects, but also came at the cost of reducing the correct identification rate and protecting guilty suspects (e.g., Clark, 2012). In 2012, Mickes, Flowe, and Wixted introduced receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis to the field of eyewitness identification to better conceptualize this tradeoff. ...
Decades of eyewitness memory research has had the worthy goal of minimizing the chances that an innocent suspect is falsely identified. However, this is not the only goal. Partial Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves provide a way to identify lineup procedures that keep the false alarm rate low while also maximizing the hit rate. Recently, there have been attempts to extend the ROC curve into high false alarm rate regions that fair lineups are intentionally designed to avoid. These new full ROCs could provide a way for the police to circumvent the protections offered by fillers in a fair lineup. Moreover, these attempts to extend the ROC curve are not based on a mathematically coherent model of latent diagnostic signals. In this article, we empirically demonstrate how this lack of a solid foundation can lead to dubious conclusions, such as eyewitnesses possessing precognition and being able to reliably identify the person they will see commit a crime in the future.
... A witness also needs to be able to identify the perpetrator if present in the lineup. More recently, experimental psychologists noticed that many of the recommended lineup procedures reduced the misidentification rate and protected innocent suspects, but also came at the cost of reducing the correct identification rate and protecting guilty suspects (e.g., Clark, 2012). In 2012, Mickes, Flowe, and Wixted introduced receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis to the field of eyewitness identification to better conceptualize this tradeoff. ...
Erroneous eyewitness identification evidence is likely the leading cause of wrongful convictions. To minimize this error, scientists recommend collecting confidence. Research shows that eyewitness confidence and accuracy are strongly related when an eyewitness identifies someone from an initial and properly administered lineup. Curiously, confidence is far less informative of accuracy when an eyewitness identifies no one and rejects the lineup instead. In this study, I aim to improve the confidence-accuracy relationship for lineup rejections in two ways. First, I aim to find the lineup that yields the strongest confidence-accuracy relationship for lineup rejections by comparing the standard procedure used by police worldwide to the novel “reveal” procedure designed by scientists to boost accuracy. Second, I aim to find the best method for collecting confidence. To achieve this aim, I make use of machine-learning techniques to compare confidence expressed in words to numeric confidence ratings. I find a significantly stronger confidence-accuracy relationship for lineup rejections in the reveal than in the standard procedure regardless of the method used to collect confidence. However, I also find that confidence expressed in words captures unique diagnostic information separate from the diagnostic information captured by numeric confidence ratings. These results can inform models of recognition memory and can improve the criminal-legal system by increasing the diagnostic value of eyewitness confidence.
... Clark is among a handful of scholars who caution that while these practices can be successful in reducing false positives, the consequence may be that they can raise the likelihood of false negatives, resulting in a true perpetrator escaping justice and remaining free to commit more crimes. 44 Clark cautions the probative value and social costs should be carefully weighed when such practices are under consideration. While we do not deny that there is risk and cost to a guilty person going free, this is most likely to occur in cases in which the case hinges entirely or heavily on a witness making a proper identification, in the absence of other compelling evidence. ...
... However, to the best of our knowledge, previous labbased voice identification studies have not encouraged reflection, so the effect on identification performance is unknown. As the results from lab-based identification research can influence policy changes (e. g., in the context of eyewitness identifications, see Clark, 2012), it is important that experimental procedures are as closely aligned with what occurs in a real scenario. In the present paper we empirically test the effect of a period of post-encoding reflection in two experiments. ...
Experiment‐based voice parades often result in low hit‐rates and high false‐alarm rates. One contributing factor may be that the experimental procedures omit elements that might naturally occur in the memory formation process, such as the process of reflection. In Experiment 1 (N = 180, F = 92) we explored if a post‐encoding reflection manipulation, compared to a simple attention control task, prior to a five‐minute retention interval would improve identification performance. In Experiment 2 (N = 180, F = 93), we explored how the effects of this manipulation might change when the retention interval was 24‐h. The results show that the inclusion of a reflection manipulation did not meaningfully improve performance in either experiment. Importantly, we found no meaningful difference in performance when directly comparing the two retention interval durations. We consider theoretical explanations for these results and discuss implications for the design and validity of earwitness voice parade studies.
... Similar results have previously been observed and discussed in relation to the difficulty in offering clear policy guidelines; illustrating the real-world problem of what to emphasise more-reducing potential misidentifications or increasing potential correct identifications (e.g. Clark, 2012;Lampinen et al., 2019;Smith et al., 2019). Additionally, it is important to highlight that our biased line-up instructions included a failure to warn the participants that the suspect might not be present and also actively implied that the suspect was in the line-up. ...
Few earlier studies have investigated the effects of highly stressful, realistic, violent, and threatening scenarios on eyewitness identification accuracy in an ecologically valid setting. The majority of studies have relied on laboratory-based simulated (videos/images) experiments. The present study investigated line-up accuracy approximately 1 week after a hostage simulation event. We administered biased line-up instructions to 50% of participants to investigate how this impacted choosing behaviour and accuracy. Based on 1030 line-up decisions (N = 122), we found that average accuracy was 38% in target present (TP) and 54% in target absent (TA) line-ups and that biased line-up instructions decreased overall accuracy (vs. unbiased). The hit rate for TP line-ups with biased instructions was 0.43 (unbiased instructions: 0.33), while the false alarm rate for TA line-ups with biased instructions was 0.60 (unbiased instructions: 0.32). We found that high confidence was associated with correct identifications and that shorter response times were indicative of correct rejections. Our findings demonstrate, in a more realistic scenario than the majority of eyewitness identification studies, the effect that biased line-up instructions lead to increased choosing and decreased accuracy.
... Año 2023 Vol 4, núm 1 pp. 1-28 DOI: 10.33115/udg_bib/qf.i1.22814 Clark, 2012;Cecconello e Stein, 2020, p. 177;Wells et al., 2020, p. 26-27;Cecconello et al., 2022, p. 182-183;Marmelstein, 2022, p. 170-174). Evidente que a formação justa do alinhamento, a fim de evitar alinhamentos tendenciosos, é bastante relevante. ...
O presente trabalho pretende extrair, a partir da trajetória do reconhecimento de pessoas no processo penal brasileiro, lições que possam contribuir para a evitação do erro judiciário. Para tanto, analisar-se-á a evolução jurisprudencial sobre o tema do reconhecimento e o discurso acerca do respeito às formalidades do art. 226 do código de processo penal brasileiro. Em seguida, com base em revisão bibliográfica de trabalhos sobre processo penal, prova judicial e psicologia do testemunho, buscar-se-á extrair algumas lições oferecidas por esta experiência, sobretudo no que diz respeito ao equívoco em apostar na superioridade moral e cognitiva dos juízes como remédio para as ilegalidades no âmbito da prova e à importância de se levar a ciência a sério, seja no desenho legislativo sobre os meios de prova, seja na atividade judicial de valoração probatória.
... Numerous previous studies have demonstrated that lineups better discriminate guiltysuspect identifications from innocent-suspect identifications than do showups (e.g., Clark, 2012;Steblay et al., 2003;Wetmore et al., 2015). In other words, lineups have better potential to rule in the guilty and protect innocent suspects than do showups. ...
Visual recognition memory has a remarkable capacity to discriminate between previously seen and novel items. Yet, research on eyewitness lineups suggests that memory is useful for detecting culprit presence, but less useful for detecting culprit absence. We show that this asymmetry is predicted by the equal-variance signal-detection model. When witnesses reject lineups, they provide a global confidence rating that none of the lineup members is the culprit. These ratings do not scale match-to-memory for the suspect and are low in diagnostic value. Consequently, the equal-variance signal-detection model predicts that a one-person showup will have better discriminability than a six-person lineup. A large-scale experiment (N = 3281) supported that prediction. However, a modified lineup in which participants were asked to follow categorical identification decisions by assigning a confidence rating to each lineup member had better discriminability than both the showup and the standard simultaneous lineup. We call this modified lineup the rule out procedure. Results also revealed a relatively weak confidence-accuracy relation for global rejections of lineups, but a much stronger confidence-accuracy relation for rejections of individual faces. Past failures to detect suspect innocence with lineups should be attributed to flawed design, not to limitations of visual recognition memory.
... 247-255. However, some studies suggest that simultaneous lineups have equal or even higher discriminability; that is, the ability to distinguish between the culprit and an innocent individual, see Clark (2012), pp. 238-259, Clark et al. (2015), pp. ...
The most common purpose of setting up a suspect lineup is to test the durability of a guilt hypothesis. However, the validity of this test is directly dependent on how the lineup is set up, conducted and evaluated. Even seemingly subtle factors such as the number of times lineup photos are displayed to witnesses can impact on the risk of error, both false positives and false negatives. In an applied setting, a decision by investigators to “try again” and go for another lap of displaying the photos, for example when the witness did not identify anyone in the first lap, can be due to a genuine will to prevent false negatives. For example, investigators may believe that the witness recognizes the suspect as the perpetrator but needs another lap to be confident enough to make an identification. However, the perception that there is a risk of a false negative can stem from a confirmation bias, that is, that investigators maintain their belief that they have identified the right suspect even in the face of information that potentially challenges that hypothesis (that the witness does not recognize the suspect as the perpetrator). The purpose of this research was to test whether and how witness accuracy and confidence are impacted by the number of laps used in a sequential photo lineup, comparing specifically one lap (original version) to two laps (two laps version). To this end, a scenario-based experiment was conducted in which participants (n = 164) were shown a film clip of a suspected rape and 1 week later suspect lineups (both target absent and present lineup) were conducted with the witnesses. Overall, the results suggest that witnesses tested with the original version more rarely erroneously identified someone when the perpetrator was absent, compared to when the two laps version was used. Yet, the ability to identify the perpetrator (when the perpetrator was present) was not significantly different among participants tested with the different methods. Overall, witnesses tested with the two laps version stated a higher degree of confidence in their decisions than did witnesses tested with the original version. The average deviation between stated confidence level and accuracy was somewhat, although not significantly, higher with the two laps version than with the original version. Hence, while investigators may fear that there is a substantial risk of a false negative if they do not continue with another lap after a witness has been unable to identify the suspect after the first lap, the present results in fact suggest that a second lap does not significantly reduce the risk of a false negative. However, a second lap does significantly increase the risk of a false positive. Taken together, the results imply that the original version of a sequential lineup (one lap) is a better option than the two laps version, although none of the versions are fool-proof.
... Although a standard signal detection analysis would predict that lowering witnesses' decision criterion would increase correct identifications as well as false identifications (see Clark, 2012; for a discussion of this general principle as it applies to eyewitness findings in particular), we note that across all published studies on the topic, the ACI has consistently been shown to inflate false identifications without also inflating correct identifications (Charman & Wells, 2007;Molinaro et al., 2013;Porter et al., 2014). In fact, a finding that a preidentification instruction disproportionately affects false identifications without affecting correct identifications is not unique to the ACI: a prelineup instruction that the witness will receive additional opportunities to identify the perpetrator if they do not make an identification from a show-up has been shown to reduce false identifications without significantly reducing correct identifications (Smith et al., 2018). ...
Although eyewitnesses’ confidence is strongly related to their accuracy under pristine conditions, several nonpristine conditions have been found that can harm this relationship, undermining the ability to infer high accuracy from high confidence (Wixted & Wells, 2017). The current study uses confidence–accuracy characteristic analyses to reanalyze data from Molinaro et al. (2013) to test whether the confidence–accuracy relationship is also harmed by (a) the appearance-change instruction (ACI)—a prelineup instruction that instructs witnesses that the perpetrator’s appearance might have changed since the time of the crime—and (b) the extent to which the target changed appearance between the crime and the lineup. Results indicate that the confidence–accuracy relationship is affected when either the ACI was given to witnesses or when the target underwent appearance change, but in different ways. Although the ACI reduced accuracy, it did so across all levels of witness confidence, maintaining a strong confidence–accuracy relationship. In contrast, target appearance change reduced accuracy selectively for high-confidence identifications, undermining the confidence–accuracy relationship. These results suggest the existence of two new conditions that must hold to infer high accuracy from high eyewitness confidence, highlight limitations on generalizing experimental results on the confidence–accuracy relationship to real-world eyewitnesses, and generally call into question the extent to which we can infer witnesses’ accuracy from their confidence.
... Another approach is to have an evidence line-up, whereby experts are provided with a number of potential samples to be compared and matched, without knowing which sample belongs to the suspect (Kukucka et al., 2020;Smith et al., 2020). Such procedures are not unfamiliar to legal psychologists, who typically recommend line-up rather than show-up procedures in the context of eyewitness identifications, because show-ups produce more false identifications than line-ups (Clark, 2012;Steblay et al., 2003). Also, legal psychologists advise that line-ups are administered double-blind; that is, the person who shows the line-up to an eyewitness should not know which line-up member is the suspect (Charman & Quiroz, 2016;Greathouse & Kovera, 2009; see also the scientific review paper on eyewitness identification recommendations; Wells et al., 2020). ...
Legal psychologists’ assessments can have a major impact on the fact finder’s evaluation of evidence and, consequently, perceptions of guilt. Yet, in the few studies about legal psychologists’ assessments and reports, great variability was found. As is the case with other forensic expert domains, legal psychologists are prone to cognitive biases, such as being adversely affected by irrelevant contextual information, confirmation bias, and allegiance bias. Based on the scientific literature, we propose several ways in which legal psychologists can minimize cognitive biases in their assessments, most notably the alternative scenario method. Furthermore, we propose guidelines for expert witnesses in the legal psychological domain, designed to make reports as scientifically grounded, applicable, readable, transparent, and bias-free as possible. We hope that the guidelines will enhance the quality of expert witness testimony provided by legal psychologists around the world.
... Assuming that each target position is equiprobable, it follows that the expected/average ROC function for sequential lineups will be dominated by the ROC function for showups. However, a different and arguably more nuanced picture is obtained when taking into consideration the different possible outcomes associated with each procedure, their respective utilities, and the prior probability of suspect being guilty (Ceci & Friedman, 2000;Clark, 2012). Table 5 reports the probabilities of the different response outcomes for both sequential lineups and showups (these outcomes were described earlier in the Introduction). ...
Sequential lineups are one of the most commonly used procedures in police departments across the USA. Although this procedure has been the target of much experimental research, there has been comparatively little work formally modeling it, especially the sequential nature of the judgments that it elicits. There are also important gaps in our understanding of how informative different types of judgments can be (binary responses vs. confidence ratings), and the severity of the inferential risks incurred when relying on different aggregate data structures. Couched in a signal detection theory (SDT) framework, the present work directly addresses these issues through a reanalysis of previously published data alongside model simulations. Model comparison results show that SDT modeling can provide elegant characterizations of extant data, despite some discrepancies across studies, which we attempt to address. Additional analyses compare the merits of sequential lineups (with and without a stopping rule) relative to showups and delineate the conditions in which distinct modeling approaches can be informative. Finally, we identify critical issues with the removal of the stopping rule from sequential lineups as an approach to capture within-subject differences and sidestep the risk of aggregation biases.
... O procedimento de show-up consiste em apresentar apenas um rosto para a testemunha e solicitar que esta reconheça se ele é o autor do crime ou não. Entretanto, em show-up há um maior risco de um falso reconhecimento, no qual uma testemunha reconheceria Antônio (suspeito inocente) simplesmente por este ser semelhante à representação mental de Pedro (criminoso; Clark, 2012). ...
Resumo Um falso reconhecimento de uma pessoa pode levar à condenação de um inocente. Um método efetivo de diminuir o falso reconhecimento é por meio do alinhamento, procedimento no qual o suspeito é apresentado em conjunto com outras pessoas - fillers (não suspeitos similares ao suspeito). Em um experimento foi comparado o desempenho de testemunhas em alinhamentos nos quais fillers apresentavam moderada ou alta similaridade em relação ao suspeito. Independentemente do grau de similaridade, suspeitos foram identificados com maior frequência que suspeitos inocentes e do que fillers, e fillers foram reconhecidos em maior frequência do que suspeitos inocentes. A similaridade entre fillers e suspeito não teve efeito na probabilidade de reconhecimento do suspeito, seja ele culpado ou inocente. Os resultados são discutidos à luz de teorias acerca do efeito de similaridade de fillers e implicações dos resultados para o sistema de justiça brasileiro.
... For more than 40 years, those who study eyewitness identification procedures have made inferences about which of two lineup procedures is superior based only on comparing the relative trade-offs between guilty-suspect identifications and innocent-suspect identifications. Numerous previous studies have demonstrated that lineups better discriminate guilty-suspect identifications from innocent-suspect identifications than do showups (e.g., Clark, 2012;Steblay et al., 2003;Wetmore et al., 2015). In other words, lineups have better potential to rule in the guilty and protect innocent suspects than do showups. ...
... If the suspect fits the description but the fillers do not, then the suspect will stand out as the obvious choice even if the suspect is innocent because the suspect is likely to better match the eyewitness's memory than any of the fillers. Fair lineups produce a better trade-off between guilty-suspect identifications and innocent-suspect identifications than do biased lineups (Clark, 2012;Fitzgerald, 2013;Lindsay & Wells, 1980). The question we address in the current article is why fair lineups produce a better tradeoff between guilty-suspect identifications and innocent-suspect identifications. ...
General Audience Summary
There is consensus among psychological scientists that fair lineups lead to a better trade-off between guilty-suspect identifications and innocent-suspect identifications than do biased lineups. Yet, debate over the mechanism that leads to this fair-lineup advantage abounds. On the one hand, some propose that fair lineups increase the ability of eyewitnesses to discriminate between the guilty and the innocent. On the other hand, others have proposed that fair lineups do not increase eyewitness discriminability, but simply spread choice preferences to fillers, and that this process is more pronounced when the suspect is innocent than when the suspect is guilty. In our first experiment, we show that fair lineups lead to (a) fewer perpetrator identifications, (b) fewer forced-choice perpetrator identifications, and (c) a similar rate of correct rejections, when compared to biased lineups. An improvement in eyewitness discriminability must manifest as an increase in perpetrator identifications, an increase in correct rejections, or both. Because fair lineups result in fewer perpetrator identifications and no more correct rejections than do biased lineups, it follows that they do not improve eyewitness discriminability. In our second experiment, we used computational modeling to demonstrate that a spreading effect we call differential filler-siphoning produces a fair-lineup advantage even when the psychology of simulated witnesses is held constant across fair and biased lineups.
... Research has shown that high filler similarity impedes target identification (Clark, 2012;Fitzgerald et al., 2013;Oriet & Fitzgerald, 2018), and that higher task difficulty is generally associated with increased perceived stress and increased sympathetic activity, including increased blood pressure (Britt, 2005;Callister et al., 1992). We anticipated that filler similarity might interact with stress in that more challenging lineups (i.e., higher filler similarity) might combine with higher levels of stress to contribute to lower identification accuracy, relative to conditions of lower stress and difficulty. ...
Witnesses to crime often experience stress during the witnessed event. However, most laboratory studies examining eyewitness memory do not include a stressful encoding event. Participants (N = 129) completed an experimental stress induction procedure—a modified version of the Trier Social Stress Test. We designed three conditions to manipulate the amount of stress experienced and included three types of measures to assess the effectiveness of the manipulation: cortisol levels (hormonal), blood pressure and heart rate (autonomic), and self‐report (subjective). Participants watched a video that had a surprise viewing of a staged theft and completed two lineup identification tasks. We observed no effects of stress on the accuracy or willingness to choose from a lineup. Importantly, there was variability in the correspondence between measured indicators of stress, which should be considered in future designs.
... A more proper measure is expected utility (Clark, 2012;Lampinen et al., 2019;Smith et al., 2019;Yang et al., 2019). The expected utility of investigator classification decisions is the weighted average of the utilities of all possible classification outcomes. ...
... Although this same body of research shows that the sequential procedure yields greater diagnosticity-that is, a higher ratio of identifications of the culprit from target-present lineups to identifications of the innocent suspect from target-absent lineups (Steblay et al., 2011)-the research also highlights that witnesses tend to become more conservative overall when undergoing a sequential lineup procedure (Meissner et al., 2005;Palmer & Brewer, 2012). The trade-off seen in this research necessitates a cost-benefit analysis that accounts for different kinds of error (Clark, 2012). Our purpose in raising this example of sequential-versus-simultaneous lineups is not to advocate for one procedure or the other, but to illustrate that the goals of policy change can be, and very often are, complicated. ...
Psycholegal research is, by design, a field devoted to evaluating and addressing issues that directly affect the justice system. At the same time, many scholars in the field have experienced first-hand the frustrations of bridging the divide between research and policy or practice. In this chapter we discuss key issues and challenges involved in bridging this divide by focusing on a number of cardinal questions: Why influence policy? When, where, and how might we do so? How much evidence must there be before adopting a particular policy? And what policies can (or should) we address? We argue that psycholegal research should operate within a translational research framework, and we encourage scholars to communicate their findings to a broader audience, spend time with the professionals for whom their research is intended, introduce students to best practices for conducting policy-relevant research, and reconsider how we evaluate one another’s contributions in the academy.
Measurement literacy is required for strong scientific reasoning, effective experimental design, conceptual and empirical validation of measurement quantities, and the intelligible interpretation of error in theory construction. This discourse examines how issues in measurement are posed and resolved and addresses potential misunderstandings. Examples drawn from across the sciences are used to show that measurement literacy promotes the goals of scientific discourse and provides the necessary foundation for carving out perspectives and carrying out interventions in science.
Various formal and informal models of eyewitness memory have been proposed. While serving to guide both the construct and analytical frameworks of research within the field, these models have yet to be critically tested through a process of empirical
falsification. This study addresses this gap by critically testing four hypotheses: the hypotheses that eyewitness memory possesses both (1) random-scale and (2) monotonic likelihood representation; the hypothesis that eyewitness memory data is (3) accurately predicted by high-threshold (HT) models; and the hypothesis that a mathematical model of eyewitness identification provides a (4) good representation of the psychological constructs of eyewitness memory and decision making. After investigating the BlockMarschak inequalities test for random-scale and monotonic-likelihood representation and developing a new critical test for the falsification of the high threshold (HT) models, two experiments were conducted online with a total of 5,056 participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Experiment 1 collected k-AFC probabilities for lineup sizes 𝑘 ∈ {2, … ,7}. Experiment 2 collected identification and ranking probabilities from a simultaneous 8-item lineup using a 3 (strong, weak, very weak memory) x 2 (low vs high expectation) x 2 (target-present vs target-absent) between-subject experimental design. Eyewitness identification outcomes were shown to have both random-scale and monotonic likelihood representation, thus allowing for the development of a mathematical model. The 2HT models of eyewitness memory were falsified and superseded by an alternative surviving model—signal detection theory (SDT). Finally, the predictive ability of the unequal-variance (UV) SDT model of simultaneous lineup identification (assuming a MAX decision rule) was confirmed, as was the independence of the model’s parameters and its generalizability across task structures. It was concluded that the UV-SDT class of models provides an evidence-based account of eyewitness identification behavior, supports the measurement of empirical eyewitness identification data, and has facilitated a shift towards the building of stronger scientific evidence.
Background:
The use of social media as a platform to access news and information has the potential to lead to the spread of fake news in Indonesia. This study aims to (1) understand the trust characteristics in information of Indonesians during COVID-19; (2) identify Indonesians' ability to detect COVID-19 fake news; and (3) analyze the relationship between people's trust characteristics in information with regard to COVID-19 information and their ability to detect fake news.
Method:
An online survey was conducted with 751 Indonesians who use social media to access information about COVID-19. Cultural theory is used to categorize people's trust characteristics in information, while signal detection theory is employed to identify people's ability to discriminate between fake and real news.
Results:
The results showed that 61% of respondents were categorized as having hierarchy trust characteristics. Concerning the detectability of fake news, most respondents could discriminate between fake and real news. Lastly, there was a relationship between trust characteristics in information and bias tendencies in detecting fake news.
Conclusions:
The respondents have hierarchy trust characteristics, indicating they trusted government information related to COVID-19 issues. The respondents also have high ability to discriminate between fake and real news, even though they tended to miss more errors than identify false alarms when detecting fake news. The findings showed that respondents who had hierarchy and egalitarian characteristics tended to perceive real news as fake news and had a better ability to distinguish fake news compared to other trust characteristics in information.
Here we apply the two-high threshold eyewitness identification model to identify the effects of lineup size on the detection-based and non-detection-based processes underlying eyewitness decisions. In Experiment 1, lineup size was manipulated by showing participants simultaneous or sequential lineups that contained either three or six persons. In Experiment 2, the lineups contained either two or five persons. In both experiments, the culprit was better detected in smaller than in larger lineups. Furthermore, participants made fewer guessing-based selections in smaller than in larger lineups. However, guessing-based selection in larger lineups was not increased to a level sufficient to offset the effect of increased protection of suspects in larger lineups due to the fact that the guessing-based selections that occur are distributed across more persons. The results show that increasing the lineup size causes several changes in the detection-based and non-detection-based processes underlying eyewitness decisions.
Suspect identifications from unbiased lineups (fair lineups) are more accurate than suspect identifications from biased lineups (Wixted & Wells, 2017). We examined whether laypersons were sensitive to the fact that suspect-identification accuracy is higher for unbiased than for biased lineups. Laypersons were presented with biased and unbiased lineups, told who the witness identified, and asked to rate the likely accuracy of the identification. Over the course of nine experiments (N = 1851), laypersons demonstrated a robust biased-lineup preference effect, in which they incorrectly judged suspect-identification accuracy as higher for biased than for unbiased lineups. This effect occurred even though laypersons were sensitive to lineup fairness and persisted even when participants were provided with the type of information needed to understand how lineups work. The biased-lineup preference effect was eliminated – but not reversed – when participants were (a) primed to rate lineup fairness prior to assessing suspect-identification accuracy and (b) when participants were provided with a comprehensive narrative explanation of how lineups work. Preference for the unbiased lineup emerged only when participants were explicitly told that accuracy was higher for unbiased lineups. Laypersons showed limited ability to reason correctly about suspect-identification accuracy from biased and unbiased lineups.
Eyewitness identification plays a crucial role in criminal investigations, but errors can lead to wrongful convictions and missed opportunities to identify the guilty. This paper introduces interactive lineups, an innovative procedure allowing witnesses to actively engage with lineup members' faces. Drawing from basic face recognition research, we explore how motion, pose reinstatement, and active exploration can improve discrimination accuracy in lineups. Our studies employ large samples, controlled culprit encoding, and ROC analysis. Results show that discrimination accuracy improves when the viewing angle matches the encoding angle, and witnesses actively reinstate the original pose. Interactive lineups enhance performance for both own-race and other-race identifications. The procedure also improves accuracy in forensic face matching tasks. The research findings demonstrate how basic science can inform policy on conducting police lineups, potentially reducing eyewitness errors and improving the justice system's reliability.
Why do people fear air travel, but text while driving? How were the travesties at the Abu Ghraib prison like a nuclear meltdown? What is the best way to throw a rocket at a robot? These are just a few questions addressed by the field of human factors psychology. These scientists use knowledge of how people think and why they act to improve the design of our world. In All Too Human, Dr. Anne McLaughlin introduces the field with vivid and topical stories that hinge on cognitive processes such as attention, memory, and decision-making. From the COVID-19 pandemic, to abandoned SCUBA divers, conspiracy theories, and the travails of online dating, McLaughlin draws on a century of research into the human mind to explain our past and predict our future.
Current recommendations about how to select fillers to serve as distractors for eyewitness lineups reflect a balancing act between selecting fillers that are similar enough to the suspect that they serve as viable alternatives to the suspect, but not choosing fillers that are so similar to the suspect they make the suspect too difficult to identify (e.g., United States Department of Justice (DOJ), Office of the Deputy Attorney General. (2017). Eyewitness identification: Procedures for conducting photo arrays. Retrieved from https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-department-wide-procedureseyewitness-identification). This chapter first provides an overview of the eyewitness identification literature. The chapter then reviews the specific areas of filler selection and filler-suspect similarity and provides background on current debates in the area of selecting fillers for eyewitness lineups. In this background different theoretical models are used and evaluated for their ability to explain how filler-suspect similarity impacts the accuracy of eyewitness identifications. The chapter also discusses the lack of concrete methods for evaluating the fairness of lineups and filler-suspect similarity. The chapter also includes a specific section addressing the “too similar” recommendation in filler selection. Finally, the chapter addresses new technological and analytical innovations that have the potential to inform the construction of lineups and identify optimal levels of filler-suspect similarity. The chapter also addresses how theoretical models might be used to inform the new future directions of research on selecting fillers for eyewitness lineups.KeywordsEyewitnessLineupsFillersMemorySystem variables
Objective : to summarize and study the law-application errors during preliminary interrogation, court investigation, and conviction in the American criminal justice system.
Methods : dialectical approach to cognition of social phenomena, allowing to analyze them in historical development and functioning in the context of the totality of objective and subjective factors, which predetermined the following research methods: formal-logical and sociological.
Results : the work describes in detail and considers four main causes of law-application errors occurring during preliminary interrogation, court investigation, and conviction in the American criminal justice system. These include: false confessions, eyewitness misidentification, forensic error, and perjured jailhouse informant testimony. Hence, it is not accidental that the main task of empirical research of criminologists and other researchers in the past two decades has been a call for greater transparency in the evidence-gathering process and the development and implementation of best practices based on social science research. Developing conceptual knowledge is important not only for creating a more systematic, generalizable and respectable criminology of wrongful conviction, but also to better inform policy-makers’ understandings that people’s lives may be at stake, as well as trade-offs of wrongful convictions.
Scientific novelty : the work considers the current problems in the American criminal justice system, that occur during preliminary interrogation, court investigation, and conviction. Among them are the problems of police interrogations, false confessions and court errors, leading to wrongful convictions.
Practical significance : the main provisions and conclusions of the article can be used in scientific, pedagogical and law enforcement activities when considering the issues related to the minimization of errors occurring at the stages of preliminary interrogation, court investigation, and conviction in the American criminal justice system.
The article was first published in English language by Criminology, Criminal Justice, Law & Society and The Western Society of Criminology Hosting by Scholastica. For more information please contact: CCJLS@WesternCriminology.org .
For original publication: Leo, R. A. (2014). The Justice Gap and the Promise of Criminological Research, Criminology, Criminal Justice, Law & Society, 15 (3), 1–37.
Publication URL: https://ccjls.scholasticahq.com/article/419-the-justice-gap-and-the-promise-of-criminological-research
The two-high threshold (2-HT) eyewitness identification model serves as a new measurement tool to measure the latent cognitive processes underlying eyewitness identification performance. By simultaneously taking into account correct culprit identifications, false innocent-suspect identifications, false filler identifications in culprit-present and culprit-absent lineups as well as correct and false lineup rejections, the model capitalizes on the full range of data categories that are observed when measuring eyewitness identification performance. Thereby, the model is able to shed light on detection-based and non-detection-based processes underlying eyewitness identification performance. Specifically, the model incorporates parameters for the detection of culprit presence and absence, biased selection of the suspect and guessing-based selection among the lineup members. Here, we provide evidence of the validity of each of the four model parameters by applying the model to eight published data sets. The data sets come from studies with experimental manipulations that target one of the underlying processes specified by the model. Manipulations of encoding difficulty, lineup fairness and pre-lineup instructions were sensitively reflected in the parameters reflecting culprit-presence detection, biased selection and guessing-based selection, respectively. Manipulations designed to facilitate the rejection of culprit-absent lineups affected the parameter for culprit-absence detection. The reanalyses of published results thus suggest that the parameters sensitively reflect the manipulations of the processes they were designed to measure, providing support of the validity of the 2-HT eyewitness identification model.
Objectives: This field-simulation experiment was designed to compare eyewitness performance when conducting showups and lineups under field versus laboratory conditions.
Hypotheses: We expected to replicate the findings from previous field-simulation experiments showing over-confidence in showup identifications made under field but not lab-conditions, and further predicted that under field-conditions, high-confidence identifications are more likely to be correct when using lineups compared to showups. It was also expected that field-conditions would lead witnesses to lower their criterion for choosing with showups, but we did not know how field-conditions would affect lineup decision-making.
Method: Participants (N = 719) witnessed the theft of a laptop computer and were asked to identify a suspect from either a live-showup, a photographic-showup, or a photographic-lineup administered under either field or lab conditions. In the field-condition, uniformed officers functioned as experimenters and participants were immersed in what they were led to believe was an actual police investigation. In the lab-condition, participants were debriefed before the identification procedure that the theft was staged for research purposes and that their identifications were being made as part of a study on eyewitness memory.
Results: As predicted, witnesses were overconfident in their showup identifications made under field but not lab-conditions, and high-confidence identifications were more likely to be correct when using lineups compared to showups. Also as expected, field-conditions led witnesses to lower their criterion for choosing with showups regardless of culprit presence. However, the opposite was true for lineups, as field-conditions resulted in witnesses raising their criterion for choosing.
Conclusions: Field-conditions had a very different effect on witness performance when conducting showups compared to lineups. When witnesses were led to believe their identification would result in the arrest and prosecution of the suspect, they became more liberal in their decision-making when showups were used, but more conservative when lineups were employed.
An information-gain approach to the analysis and interpretation of eyewitness identification data is described. The information-gain analysis is grounded in Bayesian statistics, permitting the important role of prior probabilities to be explored. This approach also forces a more complete treatment of the data and reveals important patterns that have escaped previous attention in the eyewitness identification literature. Particularly important is the ability of information-gain analyses to make salient the exonerating value of eyewitness behaviors rather than just their incriminating value. Analyses of sample data sets show how the exonerating value of filler identifications and“not there” responses can actually exceed the incriminating value of identifications of the suspect at certain points in the distribution of prior probabilities.
Staged crime research has demonstrated the utility of controlling the conduct of lineups as a means of reducing false identifications with little or no apparent decline in the rate of correct identifications by eyewitnesses (e.g., Lindsay & Wells, 1980; Malpass & Devine, 1981a; Wells, 1984). A recent variation in lineup procedure shows that a blank lineup, which includes no suspects, can reduce the rate of false identifications if it precedes the actual lineup. However, there are several practical problems that make it unlikely that police will accept this procedure. Sequential lineup presentation is proposed as a means of accomplishing the same goals of reducing false identifications with little or no loss in accurate identifications. A crime was staged for 240 unsuspecting eyewitnesses either individually or in pairs. One quarter of the eyewitnesses attempted identifications in each of four lineup conditions: Six pictures were presented either simultaneously, as used in traditional procedures, or sequentially, in which yes/no judgments were made for each picture; each procedure either contained the photograph of the criminal-confederate or a picture of a similar looking replacement. Sequential lineup presentation significantly reduced false identifications but did not significantly influence correct identifications when compared with the simultaneous procedure. This resulted in an overall increase in diagnosticity ratio (Wells & Lindsay, 1980) using the sequential procedure. The data are interpreted as supporting the conclusion that sequential presentation of lineups can reduce false identifications of innocent suspects by reducing eyewitnesses’ reliance on relative-judgment processes.
In 5 experiments and a pilot study, a total of 1,232 undergraduates watched a series of slides depicting a single auto–pedestrian accident. The purpose of these experiments was to investigate how information supplied after an event influences a witness's memory for that event. Ss were exposed to either consistent, misleading, or irrelevant information after the accident event. Results show that misleading information produced less accurate responding on both a yes–no and a 2-alternative forced-choice recognition test. Further, misleading information had a larger impact if introduced just prior to a final test rather than immediately after the initial event. The effects of misleading information cannot be accounted for by a simple demand-characteristics explanation. Overall results suggest that information to which a witness is exposed after an event, whether that information is consistent or misleading, is integrated into the witness's memory of the event.
A meta-analytic review of research comparing biased and unbiased instructions in eyewitness identification experiments showed an asymmetry, specifically that biased instructions led to a large and consistent decrease in accuracy in target-absent lineups, but produced inconsistent results for target-present lineups, with an average effect size near zero (N. M. Steblay, 1997). The results for target-present lineups are surprising, and are inconsistent with statistical decision theories (i.e., D. M. Green & J. A. Swets, 1966). A re-examination of the relevant studies and the meta-analysis of those studies shows clear evidence that correct identification rates do increase with biased lineup instructions, and that biased witnesses make correct identifications at a rate considerably above chance. Implications for theory, as well as police procedure and policy, are discussed.
The vagaries of eyewitness identification are well known; the annals of criminal law are rife with instances of mistaken identification.
Examined the suggestion that "fair" lineups should contain others who resemble the suspect in general physical appearance and considered the outcome in terms of lost convictions of guilty suspects. 96 unsuspecting witnesses to a staged crime were given the opportunity to identify a criminal (confederate) from relatively fair or unfair lineups (6-picture arrays varying high vs low similarity). One fair and 1 unfair lineup contained a picture of the criminal (criminal-present lineups), while 1 fair and 1 unfair lineup contained a picture of an innocent suspect who resembled the criminal (criminal-absent lineup). Results indicate that high-similarity lineups produced less identification of the criminal and of the innocent suspect than low-similarity lineups. However, the reduction in identification of the criminal was much less dramatic than the reduction of identifications of the innocent suspect. A Bayesian analysis revealed that identification evidence obtained from relatively fair high-similarity lineups is superior to similar evidence obtained from relatively unfair low-similarity lineups. It is concluded that the cost of using fair lineups is rather small. (13 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved)
The search for the most effective conflict resolution procedure requires identification of the primary objective in resolving different kinds of disputes. This Article focuses on the kind of disputes considered in the legal system and draws on the results of the authors' empirical studies to develop a general theory of procedure for attaining the objectives of "truth" and "justice" in situations of cognitive conflict, conflict of interest, and in "mixed" disputes.
Sequential lineups were offered as an alternative to the traditional simultaneous lineup. Sequential lineups reduce incorrect lineup selections; however, the accompanying loss of correct identifications has resulted in controversy regarding adoption of the technique. We discuss the procedure and research relevant to (1) the pattern of results found using sequential versus simultaneous lineups; (2) reasons (theory) for differences in witness responses; (3) two methodological issues; and (4) implications for policy decisions regarding the adoption of sequential lineups.
The criminal justice system relies heavily on eyewitnesses to determine the facts surrounding criminal events. Eyewitnesses may identify culprits, recall conversations, or remember other details. An eyewitness who has no motive to lie is a powerful form of evidence for jurors, especially if the eyewitness appears to be highly confident about his or her recollection. In the absence of definitive proof to the contrary, the eyewitness's account is generally accepted by police, prosecutors, judges, and juries.
However, the faith the legal system places in eyewitnesses has been shaken recently by the advent of forensic DNA testing. Given the right set of circumstances, forensic DNA testing can prove that a person who was convicted of a crime is, in fact, innocent. Analyses of DNA exoneration cases since 1992 reveal that mistaken eyewitness identification was involved in the vast majority of these convictions, accounting for more convictions of innocent people than all other factors combined. We review the latest figures on these DNA exonerations and explain why these cases can only be a small fraction of the mistaken identifications that are occurring.
Decades before the advent of forensic DNA testing, psychologists were questioning the validity of eyewitness reports. Hugo Münsterberg's writings in the early part of the 20th century made a strong case for the involvement of psychological science in helping the legal system understand the vagaries of eyewitness testimony. But it was not until the mid- to late 1970s that psychologists began to conduct programmatic experiments aimed at understanding the extent of error and the variables that govern error when eyewitnesses give accounts of crimes they have witnessed. Many of the experiments conducted in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s resulted in articles by psychologists that contained strong warnings to the legal system that eyewitness evidence was being overvalued by the justice system in the sense that its impact on triers of fact (e.g., juries) exceeded its probative (legal-proof) value. Another message of the research was that the validity of eyewitness reports depends a great deal on the procedures that are used to obtain those reports and that the legal system was not using the best procedures.
Although defense attorneys seized on this nascent research as a tool for the defense, it was largely ignored or ridiculed by prosecutors, judges, and police until the mid 1990s, when forensic DNA testing began to uncover cases of convictions of innocent persons on the basis of mistaken eyewitness accounts. Recently, a number of jurisdictions in the United States have implemented procedural reforms based on psychological research, but psychological science has yet to have its fullest possible influence on how the justice system collects and interprets eyewitness evidence.
The psychological processes leading to eyewitness error represent a confluence of memory and social-influence variables that interact in complex ways. These processes lend themselves to study using experimental methods. Psychological science is in a strong position to help the criminal justice system understand eyewitness accounts of criminal events and improve their accuracy. A subset of the variables that affect eyewitness accuracy fall into what researchers call system variables, which are variables that the criminal justice system has control over, such as how eyewitnesses are instructed before they view a lineup and methods of interviewing eyewitnesses. We review a number of system variables and describe how psychological scientists have translated them into procedures that can improve the probative value of eyewitness accounts. We also review estimator variables, variables that affect eyewitness accuracy but over which the system has no control, such as cross-race versus within-race identifications.
We describe some concerns regarding external validity and generalization that naturally arise when moving from the laboratory to the real world. These include issues of base rates, multicollinearity, selection effects, subject populations, and psychological realism. For each of these concerns, we briefly note ways in which both theory and field data help make the case for generalization.
A considerable amount of empirical research has been conducted on ways to improve the eyewitness identification process, with emphasis on the use of lineups. Public policy changes are currently underway with respect to lineup procedures: Sequential lineups are being recommended to police as the best practice. This may be premature because the conditions under which sequential lineups are superior to simultaneous lineups are not well understood given the current literature: Many studies are reported with insufficient detail needed to judge the adequacy of the research design, new data show that the sequential superiority effect may vary as a function of study methodology, theoretical assumptions have not been adequately tested, and important comparisons that may rule out the ostensible superiority of the sequential lineup have not been studied. This review summarizes the literature, presents new data, and identifies the need for further empirical work before appropriately grounded recommendations as to the superiority of sequential lineups can be made. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The risk of eyewitnesses making false identifications is influenced by the methods used to construct and conduct lineups. The legal system could impose 4 simple rules to reduce false identifications: (a) Eyewitnesses should be informed that the culprit might not be in the lineup, (b) the suspect should not stand out in the lineup, (c) lineups should be administered by someone who does not know who the suspect is, and (d) witnesses should be asked how certain they are of their choice before other information contaminates their judgment. The U.S. Supreme Court has acknowledged the dangers of mistaken identification but has not used exclusionary rules to control unnecessary risk. Judicial rulings should focus on risky lineup methods and impose standards to eliminate potential justice system contributions to false identification. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Questions the criminal justice system's practice of treating eyewitness lineup identifications (IDs) of suspects (SUs) as highly informative while treating nonidentifications (NIDs) (i.e., no choice responses or choices of foils) as uninformative. A Bayesian model of information gain is used to mathematically prove that (a) if an eyewitness ID of an SU increases the probability that the SU is the criminal, then an NID must decrease the probability that the SU is the criminal; and (b) the
relative diagnosticity of IDs vs NIDs is determined by the probability of obtaining an ID vs NID, with NIDs being more diagnostic if they are relatively less frequent than IDs. An application of the model to previously published data shows NIDs to be more than 150% as diagnostic as IDs regarding the probability that the SU is the criminal. A breakdown of NIDs into 2 types, eyewitness choices of a lineup foil vs no-choice decisions, suggests that the latter is more informative than the former regarding the probability that the SU is innocent. Cognitive mechanisms that may be responsible for criminal justice investigators discounting of NIDs are discussed in relation to research on human judgment. (22 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Many states and communities are rewriting their eyewitness identification policies. Some of these jurisdictions are excluding simultaneous lineups altogether, and others are allowing them if double-blind administration of sequential lineups is not possible. The Innocence Project advocates the latter and puts forward blind sequential-lineup administration as the best form of lineup identification. Although sequential lineups are claimed to be superior, no explicit policy analysis has been done. In the present study, the author uses a policy-analysis model based on decision theory to examine the utility of simultaneous and sequential lineups, as well as to examine a range of values placed on identification outcomes and their probabilities. Simultaneous lineups are shown to be superior to sequential lineups under most conditions examined in this analysis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
There are 2 families of statistical procedures in meta-analysis: fixed- and random-effects procedures. They were developed for somewhat different inference goals: making inferences about the effect parameters in the studies that have been observed versus making inferences about the distribution of effect parameters in a population of studies from a random sample of studies. The authors evaluate the performance of confidence intervals and hypothesis tests when each type of statistical procedure is used for each type of inference and confirm that each procedure is best for making the kind of inference for which it was designed. Conditionally random-effects procedures (a hybrid type) are shown to have properties in between those of fixed- and random-effects procedures. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
A decade ago, a meta-analysis showed that identification of a suspect from a sequential lineup versus a simultaneous lineup was more diagnostic of guilt (Steblay, Dysart, Fulero, & Lindsay, 2001). Since then, controversy and debate regarding sequential superiority has emerged. We report the results of a new meta-analysis involving 72 tests of simultaneous and sequential lineups from 23 different labs involving 13,143 participant-witnesses. The results are very similar to the 2001 results in showing that the sequential lineup is less likely to result in an identification of the suspect, but also more diagnostic of guilt than is the simultaneous lineup. An examination of the full diagnostic design dataset (27 tests that used the full simultaneous/sequential × culprit-present/culprit-absent design) showed that the average gap in correct identifications favoring the simultaneous lineup over the sequential lineup—8%—is smaller than the 15% figure obtained from the 2001 meta-analysis (and from the current full 72-test dataset). The lower error rate incurred for culprit-absent lineups with use of a sequential format remains consistent across the years, with 22% fewer errors than simultaneous lineups. A Bayesian analysis shows that the posterior probability of guilt following an identification of the suspect is higher for the sequential lineup across the entire base rate for culprit presence/absence. New ways to think about policy issues are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Although eyewitness identifications are among the most common forms of evidence presented in criminal trials, both archival studies and psychological research suggest that eyewitnesses are frequently mistaken in their identifications (B. L. Cutler & S. D. Penrod, 1995). In recognition of this problem, the legal system has established a number of safeguards to protect defendants from erroneous convictions resulting from mistaken identifications. These safeguards are based on assumptions regarding attorney, judge, and juror commonsense knowledge of the factors influencing eyewitness identification accuracy. This article addresses the validity of these assumptions by examining the role of commonsense knowledge in attorney, judge, and juror evaluations of eyewitness identification evidence. It concludes that, although these safeguards may not be as effective as the legal system intended them to be, there are a number of practices and policies that may be implemented to safeguard defendants further. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
There is increasing evidence that false eyewitness identification is the primary cause of the conviction of innocent people. In 1996, the American Psychology/Law Society and Division 41 of the American Psychological Association appointed a subcommittee to review scientific evidence and make recommendations regarding the best procedures for constructing and conducting lineups and photospreads. Three important themes from the scientific literature relevant to lineup methods were identified and reviewed, namely relative-judgment processes, the lineups-as-experiments analogy, and confidence malleability. Recommendations are made that double-blind lineup testing should be used, that eyewitnesses should be forewarned that the culprit might not be present, that distractors should be selected based on the eyewitness's verbal description of the perpetrator, and that confidence should be assessed and recorded at the time of identification. The potential costs and benefits of these recommendations are discussed.
Part II defines the relevance ratio and explains its relation to probabilistic reasoning. Part Ill uses the ratio to explore the ways in which physicians have misused the term "consistent with sexual abuse" in child abuse cases. Part IV considers whether symptoms "consistent with sexual abuse," although irrelevant for the purpose of proving abuse, may nevertheless be admissible for rebutting the assertion that abuse did not occur. Part V uses the relevance ratio to show that symptoms that are common among abused children may nonetheless have little if any relevance for proving that abuse occurred. Part VI discusses the relevance of clusters of symptoms and reveals ways in which clusters are likely to be less relevant than often believed. Part VII outlines the methodological limitations of existing research on the symptoms of child sexual abuse and explains why they may lead to poor estimates of the relevance ratio. Part VIII uses the relevance ratio to demonstrate that probative asymmetries exist between the presence and absence of various symptoms. Part IX discusses the significance of the existence of symptoms among nonabused children for understanding the significance of those symptoms among abused children.
Inside the Juror presents the most interesting and sophisticated work to date on juror decision making from several traditions - social psychology, behavioural decision theory, cognitive psychology, and behavioural modeling. The authors grapple with crucial questions, such as: why do jurors who hear the same evidence and arguments in the courtroom enter the jury room with disagreements about the proper verdict? how do biases and prejudices affect jurors' decisions? and just how 'rational' is the typical juror? As an introduction to the scientific study of juror decision making in criminal trials, Inside the Juror provides a comprehensive and understandable summary of the major theories of juror decision making and the research that has been conducted to evaluate their validity.
Although eyewitness identifications are among the most common forms of evidence presented in criminal trials, both archival studies and psychological research suggest that eyewitnesses are frequently mistaken in their identifications (B. L. Cutler & S. D. Penrod, 1995). In recognition of this problem, the legal system has established a number of safeguards to protect defendants from erroneous convictions resulting from mistaken identifications. These safeguards are based on assumptions regarding attorney, judge, and juror commonsense knowledge of the factors influencing eyewitness identification accuracy. This article addresses the validity of these assumptions by examining the role of commonsense knowledge in attorney, judge, and juror evaluations of eyewitness identification evidence. It concludes that, although these safeguards may not be as effective as the legal system intended them to be, there are a number of practices and policies that may be implemented to safeguard defendants further. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
Experiment 1 tested one-person and six-person photographic lineup identifications in field situations either immediately or 30 minutes, or 2 hours, or 24 hours after a 15-second ordinary encounter with a target. Accuracy of performance was superior in six-person lineups than in showups over time. False identifications of a lookalike innocent suspect were significantly greater in showups than in six-person lineups, especially when the suspect were the same clothing as the culprit. Experiment 2 followed the same research design as Experiment 1, except that only live showup identifications were tested and, in addition, a physically dissimilar innocent suspect was shown to witnesses. The dissimilar innocent suspect was consistently and correctly rejected in the target-absent showup. Hit rates for live suspects were relatively low over the 24-h retention interval. Correct rejections significantly exceeded false identifications only on the immediate test. The lookalike innocent suspect was readily rejected when different clothing was worn at the test. No significant differences were found in hit scores or in confidence-accuracy scores between live and photographic targets. Confidence-accuracy correlations were significant but low across experimental conditions.
This book treats problems in the epistemology of the law. Beginning with the premise that the principal function of a criminal trial is to find out the truth about a crime, Larry Laudan examines the rules of evidence and procedure that would be appropriate if the discovery of the truth were, as higher courts routinely claim, the overriding aim of the criminal justice system. Laudan mounts a systematic critique of existing rules and procedures that are obstacles to that quest. He also examines issues of error distribution by offering the first integrated analysis of the various mechanisms-the standard of proof, the benefit of the doubt, the presumption of innocence and the burden of proof-for implementing society’s view about the relative importance of the errors that can occur in a trial.
In this Article, Professors Ceci and Friedman analyze psychological studies on children's suggestibility and find a broad consensus that young children are suggestible to a significant degree. Studies confirm that interviewers commonly we suggestive interviewing techniques that exacerbate this suggestibility, creating a significant risk in some forensic contexts-notably but not exclusively those of suspected child abuse-that children will make false assertions of fact. Professors Ceci and Friedman address the implications of this difficulty for the legal system and respond to Professor Lyon's criticism of this view recently articulated tn the Cornell Law Review. Using Bayesian probability theory, Professors Ceci and Friedman assess the implications of children's suggestibility for fact-finding in adjudication. Based on the constitutionally compelled principle that an inaccurate criminal conviction is a far morse result than a failure to gain an accurate conviction, even a slight risk of false allegations is significant Professors Ceci and Friedman present several policy implications that follow from their analysis. First, interviewers should use leading questions only as a last resort, and they should completely avoid some strongly suggestive techniques that create particularly significant risks of false allegation. Second, except in very limited circumstances the fact that a child has been subjected to suggestive questioning should not preclude her from testifying. Instead in appropriate cases, courts should be receptive to expert evidence on the suggestibility of children. Furthermore, in some extreme cases in which the child's allegation is essential to the prosecution and the child was subjected to very strongly suggestive influences, a criminal conviction should be precluded. To the extent that reliability is a factor in determining the admissibility of hearsay statements, in some circumstances children's statements should be considered unreliable. Finally, absent exigent circumstances, all interviews conducted as part of a criminal abuse investigation should be videotaped, to reduce the uncertainty as to whether interviewers have used suggestive questioning techniques.
Citl'. TN 37614. Hc received his baccalaureatc degree fiom East Tcnnessee State University', his master's degree from Eastcrn Kentucky Universitv. and the Ph.D. fromThc Universitt,of Tenncssee. Priorto his universitl' appointment. Dr Miller scrved l0 years as a law enforcement officer and "r'as director of the Waltcrs State Cnme Laboratory in Morristown, Tennessee, for -J vears. Dr. Millir's major research intercsts are in thc areas of police administration, criminal justicc education. and crinrinalistics.
Recent research about policing often aspires to emulate the model of medical research—randomized experiments designed to establish conclusively what works. This approach to scientific research produces instrumental knowledge about the best means to a given end, and it can contribute usefully to many important debates in policing. But by itself, it cannot speak to the full range of concerns relevant to criminal justice practice, which is characterized by a great variety and ambiguity of values. Police will benefit from instrumental knowledge, but they will also benefit from better forms of practical reasoning—something that scholarship can help to develop in ways that this article describes. Knowledge about policing should be more like legal knowledge than medical knowledge (or more precisely, than the aspect of medical knowledge that criminal justice scholars have emphasized).
Professor Tribe considers the accuracy, appropriateness, and possible dangers of utilizing mathematical methods in the legal process, first in the actual conduct of civil and criminal trials, and then in designing procedures for the trial system as a whole. He concludes that the utility of mathematical methods for these purposes has been greatly exaggerated. Even if mathematical techniques could significantly enhance the accuracy of the trial process, Professor Tribe also shows that their inherent conflict with other important values would be too great to allow their general use.
When investigating crimes police frequently use eyewitness identification tests such as lineups in an attempt to establish the culprit's identity. It is now well documented that witnesses commonly make mistakes, sometimes identifying innocent suspects or failing to identify the culprit. Lineup administrators also make mistakes in the sense that they use procedures that increase the likelihood of eyewitness error. Eyewitness memory research has provided a basis for many useful guidelines regarding the conduct of identification tests. Here, we review the relevant research underpinning effective procedures for lineup construction, lineup presentation, recording the witness's decision, and providing feedback to the witness. The systematic implementation of these guidelines is likely to reduce significantly the extent of eyewitness errors at the identification test and improve the probative value of courtroom testimony about identity. However, further significant advances may well require the development of novel procedures for accessing witnesses' memories.
"This is the classic work upon which modern-day game theory is based. What began more than sixty years ago as a modest proposal that a mathematician and an economist write a short paper together blossomed, in 1944, when Princeton University Press published Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. In it, John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern conceived a groundbreaking mathematical theory of economic and social organization, based on a theory of games of strategy. Not only would this revolutionize economics, but the entirely new field of scientific inquiry it yielded--game theory--has since been widely used to analyze a host of real-world phenomena from arms races to optimal policy choices of presidential candidates, from vaccination policy to major league baseball salary negotiations. And it is today established throughout both the social sciences and a wide range of other sciences. This sixtieth anniversary edition includes not only the original text but also an introduction by Harold Kuhn, an afterword by Ariel Rubinstein, and reviews and articles on the book that appeared at the time of its original publication in the New York Times, tthe American Economic Review, and a variety of other publications. Together, these writings provide readers a matchless opportunity to more fully appreciate a work whose influence will yet resound for generations to come.
Contents:Introduction and Scope, p.1Components of Diagnostic Decision Making, p.4Statistical Machinery, p.5Examples of Enhanced Descision Making, p.10Conclusion and Discussion, p.20Acknowledgements, p.23References, p.23Appendix: Some Concepts of Possibility, p.25
In this paper we use reported exonerations as a window on false convictions generally. We can't come close to estimating the number of false convictions that occur in the United States, but the accumulating mass of exonerations gives us a glimpse of what we're missing. We located 340 individual exonerations from 1989 through 2003, not counting at least 135 innocent defendants in at least two mass exonerations, and not counting more than 70 defendants convicted in a series of childcare sex abuse prosecutions, most of whom were probably innocent. Almost all the individual exonerations that we know about are clustered in the two most serious common felonies: rape and murder. They are surrounded by widening circles of categories of cases that include false convictions that are rarely detected, if ever: rape convictions that have not been reexamined with DNA evidence; robberies, for which DNA identification is useless; murder cases that are ignored because the defendants were not sentenced to death; assault and drug convictions that are forgotten entirely; misdemeanor convictions that aren't even part of the picture. Judging from our data, any plausible guess at the total number of miscarriages of justice in America in the last fifteen years must run to the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, in felony cases alone. We can, however, see some clear patterns in those false convictions that have come to light. For rape the dominant problem is eyewitness misidentification - and cross-racial misidentification in particular, which accounts for the extraordinary number of exonerations in rape cases with black defendants and white victims. For murder, the leading cause of the false convictions we know about is perjury - including perjury by police officers, by jailhouse snitches, by the real killers, and by supposed participants and eyewitnesses to the crime who knew the innocent defendants in advance. False confessions also played a large role in the murder convictions that led to exonerations, primarily among two particularly vulnerable groups of innocent defendants: juveniles, and those who are mentally retarded or mentally ill. Almost all the juvenile exonerees who falsely confessed were African American. In fact, one of our more startling findings is that 90% of all exonerated juvenile defendants were black or Hispanic, an extreme disparity that, unfortunately, is of a piece with racial disparities in our juvenile justice system in general. Nearly a quarter of exonerated defendants had been sentenced to death, despite the fact that death row inmates make up only about one-quarter of one percent of the population American prisoners, and a much smaller proportion of the those who pass through our prisons over time. This appears to reflect two simultaneous patterns: capital defendants are more likely to be convicted in error, and false convictions are more likely to be detected when the defendants are on death row. That means that capital defendants who are not sentenced to death, or defendants in similar murder prosecutions in which the death penalty was not sought, may be in the worst position of all: they may suffer the same high risk of false conviction as death row inmates, but get no benefit from the comparatively high chance of exoneration after conviction.
The Department of Justice, as well as leading innocence organizations, have studied the social science findings on eyewitness identification procedures and have published recommendations to address the pitfalls outlined in the scientific literature. This Article provides a comparative study of the eyewitness identification recommendations of these groups and demonstrates that there is a growing national consensus on the procedures most likely to produce accurate identifications. The Article suggests that the proposed reforms must be adopted at the state level in order to attain widespread adoption. There is currently a lack of congruence between the reforms proposed by reform organizations and those proposed by legislators. Many of the reforms proposed in state legislatures would make only minor, relatively cost-free changes, whereas those proposed by reform advocates would seemingly impose greater costs. This Article urges innocence reform advocates to provide legislators with the political tools they need to enact the necessary critical reforms in eyewitness identification procedures. Unlike legislators, judges and lawyers tend to think in terms of moral imperatives, notions of fundamental justice, and the rule of law without giving much thought to the costs associated with establishing a justice system that reflects these ideals. But in the world of policy-making in which legislators operate, costs are a central concern. The Article proposes that reformers might engage the public policy research institutes at universities in reform-targeted states so that researchers can conduct cost-benefit analyses for proposed reforms. Preliminary reports on the feasibility of the most widely recommended improvements in eyewitness identification procedures indicate that the changes can be made without major disruption in the operation of investigations and without large increases in costs, but further study is in order.
"Better that n guilty men go free than one innocent man be punished." Blackstone and Justice Douglas had n = 10; the Romans had n = 1; the Jews had n = 1000; Ben Franklin had n = 100. The U.S. Supreme Court sides with the Romans.n is the father of criminal law. This (humorous) article traces the history of n from the dawn of time to modern U.S. jurisprudence. The evolution of n (both in Anglo-American law and in foreign lands), the gender and species of the "one innocent man," and the possible types of punishment contemplated in connection with the maxim, are discussed. The views of prominent skeptics are explored. Values of n are compared and contrasted on the federal and state levels. States and federal circuits with high values of n are recommended as possible residences for potential criminals.
A group of nonscience forensic sciences has developed over the past century. These are fields within the broader forensic sciences that have little or no basis in actual science. They are not applications of established basic sciences, they have not systematically tested their own hypotheses, and they make unsupported assumptions and exaggerated claims. This review explains the nature and origins of those nonscience forensic fields, which include the forensic individualization sciences and certain other areas, such as fire and arson investigation. We explore the role of the courts in maintaining the underdeveloped state of these fields and consider suggestions for improving this state of affairs (addressing the potential role that could be played by these fields themselves, by the courts, and by normal sciences).